The Phenomenon of Complicity Remediation Paradox

[Martin]

Something I posted previously on Discussions.

In the paradoxical constellation of modern paradigms and situations, there’s one hidden phenomenon that fascinates me. Until someone suggests a better term - I’ll call it Complicity Remediation paradox.

It’s a paradox that highlights the dual role played by us, the members of the society and the institutions that represent us - as both perpetrators and healers within a system that perpetuates certain harms.

The key aspects of the Complicity Remediation Paradox are:

1. Involuntary Complicity - individuals unknowingly complicit in contributing to negative outcomes due to not being able to fully evaluate the impacts of the government’s decisions making or because the systemic structures are beyond immediate control. There is often a significant gap between the information available to policymakers and the general public. This asymmetry can lead to a lack of understanding among citizens about the full implications of government projects and policies.
2. Political Incentives - Politicians are often incentivised to make decisions that will make them appear performant and boost their chances for re-election. This can lead to short-term thinking and a focus on visible, immediate results rather than long-term systemic change. The invisible gets hidden in the system that is sub-optimally transparent.
3. Remedial Altruism - individuals willing to engage in altruistic actions to mitigate the negative impacts
4. Systemic Dissonance and Feedback Delay - dissonance from living within systems that are misaligned with our personal values and the desire for social and environmental well-being. The consequences of harmful policies may take time to become apparent, and by the time they do, the damage may already be significant and the causal relationship obfuscated. This delay can make it challenging to address the root causes promptly.
5. Agency Dilemma - dilemma regarding agency where it feels like people have very little control over the contributory aspects of the problems, but are fully empowered to participate in the remedial actions.

There is a stark contrast of “no control” over decisions but “full empowerment” when it comes to remedying them!

The Current Model

The current model often operates on a remedial approach, where the government undertakes or supports projects that, while economically beneficial in the short term, create negative externalities that charities and non-profits must then address. This creates a feedback loop that is both inefficient and ethically questionable.

The moral hazard in this scenario is that decision-makers in government may not be sufficiently incentivised to prioritise long-term social and environmental outcomes (or focus on the substance instead of appearance), as the immediate economic gains are more tangible and politically rewarding. This can lead to a misallocation of public funds, where the opportunity cost is the foregone benefits of investing in sustainable and just practices from the outset.

Democracy Angle

While not limited to democracies, the dynamics of this paradox may be more visible and pronounced in democratic societies due to the expectations of citizens of common good orientation and government accountability.

The link between the citizens and the government is established through our power to both elect the government and influence it through advocacy and public discourse. This paradox emerges when there’s a disconnect between the collective will of the people and the actions of our elected representatives and it’s defined by the opposing action, seemingly internally generated. Taxpayers might be unwilling participants behind government’s actions, but still fully legitimising them.

Examples

Wars and Military Conflicts

Complicity:
We, as taxpayers of democratic nations, pay taxes that are used to fund military operations. Some of these operations may result in civilian casualties, material damage, refugee crisis and destabilisation.

Remediation: The same citizens may donate to humanitarian organisation and charities that provide aid to affected war-torn regions to offset the damage caused by the conflict that their taxes helped finance.

Environmental Destruction:

Complicity: Consumers purchase goods and services that contribute environmental harm - deforestation, biodiversity loss, polluting industries.

Remediation: The same consumers invest their time and money to contribute organisations fight climate change or mitigate damage caused to the nature.

Social Injustice:

Complicity: Societal structures and institutions may be perpetuating systemic racism, various discrimination or other forms of social injustice. People participate in these systems through daily interactions, employment or consumption patterns.

Remediation: Citizens may volunteer their time or materially contribute to social justice organisations or initiatives. They can participate in advocacy campaigns to combat the very injustices that they are, through the taxation and representative leadership, standing behind.

In each of these example, the paradox lies in the fact that the same individuals or collectives, through their action or inaction, are contributing to systemic problems while at the same time trying to alleviate the consequences of those problems.

Externalising the Cost - Internalising the Benefits

Complicit Remediation paradox offers a good explanatino of how governments benefit from positive aspects of decisions and how they avoid or dilute their accountability and responsibility for the bad ones.

Externalising the Costs

When a government undertakes or supports activities that lead to negative outcomes without bearing the full cost of the remedial action - it’s externalising the costs. These costs are instead borne by the public, whether in the form of remedy costs, degraded environments, poor health or social injustice. So the government’s mistakes and negative impact get cushioned and hidden by the good effort of “non-governmental” collective of people, allowing the government to continue behaving recklessly and take risks that it wouldn’t otherwise.

Internalising the Benefits

At the same time, governments may internalise the benefits of such activities by taking credit for immediate positive impacts that came on the back of the negative aspects that remained hidden because of the offset of the cost externalisation. This shines a positive light on the elected representatives who are then encouraged to risk more and potentially further increase the effect of cost externalisation.

It’s difficult to evaluate what percentage of society engages in remedial actions and it probably differs significantly from one country to another. Still, it’s only a segment of a society that donates to charities, volunteers for social, environment or humanitarian causes, participates in related activism, makes lifestyle changes or supports businesses that engage in ethical practices.

This points at another injustice - that the contributing minority is also externalising the cost for the individuals that don’t make personal sacrifices in this accountability deficit re-balancing act.

Are Grassroots or Bottom-up Approaches to Systemic Change Perpetuating the Complicity-Remediation Paradox?

Grassroots and bottom-up approaches face challenges in affecting systemic changes due to the factors related to their relative capacity compared to top-down or direct system interventions.

They suffer from resource constraints and less access to powerful networks than the top-down efforts. Political influence that is required to make the right impact at the top is not readily available to often ideologically opposed activists.

Grassroots movements can be extremely fragmented and suffering from the narcissism of small differences. Their collective impact is reduced by not presenting a unified front needed to challenge the established systems.

While grassroots activists have knowledge about local issues, they may lack the broader perspective and expertise, which can make their efforts seem naive and lacking pragmatism.

All of these reasons make grassroots movements more likely to adopt a remedial focus such as cleaning up pollution or providing services to marginalised communities, rather than challenging the systems that create these issues.

[Naeema]

@Martin your recent posts including this articulation of the Complicity Remediation Paradox have been resonating deeply with the existential tensions I’ve been navigating and grappling with in my daily work…

The dynamic you describe, wherein individuals are structurally disempowered in the creation of harm but socially and morally tasked with its remediation, feels like a precise diagnostic of the systemic bind we’re caught in. I wonder if what you’re describing also hints at a deeper systemic immunity to transformation, where well-intentioned remedial efforts, especially those undertaken by grassroots movements, end up buffering the system from collapse without fundamentally challenging its logic. Could it be that our capacity to respond compassionately is itself being absorbed as a form of systemic resilience that stabilizes the very paradigm we hope to transition from?

This leads me to contemplate whether part of the paradigm shift requires moving beyond both complicity and remediation as defined within the current frame, toward structures that allow for non-complicit participation and agency not predicated on offsetting harm. Beyond resistance or reform, should part of our enquiry be to sense parallel institutions that allow for non-complicit participation? What might genuine “offramps” from the paradox look like: technologically, culturally, or economically?

This opens further questions around how we cultivate agency outside the moral economics of damage control, and whether true paradigm shift might require a new relationship not only to systems, but to meaning, time, and accountability itself.

How we design and inhabit those structures, socially, economically, epistemologically, is perhaps a key question for those of us exploring the edge of paradigm transition.

[Martin]

@Naeema

I wonder if what you’re describing also hints at a deeper systemic immunity to transformation, where well-intentioned remedial efforts, especially those undertaken by grassroots movements, end up buffering the system from collapse without fundamentally challenging its logic. Could it be that our capacity to respond compassionately is itself being absorbed as a form of systemic resilience that stabilizes the very paradigm we hope to transition from?

Thanks @Naeema

Probably nothing unusual and surprising about systems’ resistance and reluctance to change. The second bit is interesting though - the system is weaponising what might be described as our compassion (but there are multiple framings here) and using it to stabilise itself and offset the negatives by “externalising the cost”. This offsetting effort directly feeds back into the sustainability of the system.

Even if we acknowledge that we’re stuck between cognitive dissonance and sense-making cul-de-sac - the agency dilemma directs us towards remediation.

[Naeema]

Appreciate your response @Martin especially your framing of how systems stabilize themselves by “externalizing cost” and strategically channelling compassion. I’d like to both build on that and complicate it a bit further.

While it’s true that systems are often reluctant to change, I’d argue that this isn’t simply due to inertia or inefficiency. Rather, many of the stabilizing features we observe, including the moral “offsets” you describe, may be better understood not as failures or deviations, but as integral features of how these systems are designed to operate. In this framing, symbolic ethical gestures (public rituals of compassion, humanitarian discourse, diversity optics, etc.) don’t counteract injustice so much as absorb, deflect, and manage it, ensuring the system’s continuity without requiring substantive transformation.

This doesn’t mean there is some secret cabal orchestrating outcomes from behind the curtain. To be very clear: this is not a conspiracy theory. It is a structural analysis, rooted in traditions of critical theory, institutional sociology, and political philosophy (from Arendt and Althusser to Foucault and Wendy Brown). The argument is not that bad actors are coordinating harm in secret, but that systems evolve in ways that protect their foundational logic; through routinized procedures, symbolic reforms, and compartmentalized ethics.

Institutions designed to “check power” such as legal oversight bodies, ethics panels, or human rights commissions often function less as disruptors and more as mechanisms of legitimacy management. They provide the appearance of accountability, often by individualising responsibility or containing critique within procedural boundaries. This can foster what might be called structured complicity: people know something is wrong, but the system offers pre-approved channels for expression that effectively reintegrate dissent into the status quo.

So the question becomes: are we witnessing a system failing to live up to its ideals, or one that has been remarkably successful at managing moral dissonance while remaining fundamentally unchanged?

This reframes the “agency dilemma.” The challenge may not simply be to act more ethically within existing systems, but to question whether those systems offer any meaningful path toward ethical coherence in the first place. Not in a nihilistic sense but in the spirit of reimagining what moral engagement looks like outside of the structures that currently define it.

Would be interested to hear your thoughts on whether you see potential for internal reform, or whether this dynamic calls for a more radical reconceptualization of agency and structure.

[Martin]

@Naeema

While it’s true that systems are often reluctant to change, I’d argue that this isn’t simply due to inertia or inefficiency. Rather, many of the stabilizing features we observe, including the moral “offsets” you describe, may be better understood not as failures or deviations, but as integral features of how these systems are designed to operate. In this framing, symbolic ethical gestures (public rituals of compassion, humanitarian discourse, diversity optics, etc.) don’t counteract injustice so much as absorb, deflect, and manage it, ensuring the system’s continuity without requiring substantive transformation.

I believe that we must clarify bounded domains here. One is the system itself that once it’s put into motion has to take its own health and welfare very seriously. Systems should not be open to modification unless sanctioned by the system owner, articulated within updated explicit specifications and implemented using system’s interfaces and functionality. So, the system is reluctant to change because it’s supposed to shield its integrity which is defined by its implied state (and it can’t be the arbitrar of itself to decide that it should mutate, etc…)

The next thing is that I don’t believe that “systems evolve”. They are not live organisms - this ventures towards the myth of complexification and is a type of mystification. Systems can become corrupt (and there are various types of corruption - design, implementation, cultural, operational…) - but that’s not systems evolving - it means systems becoming broken.

@Naeema

So the question becomes: are we witnessing a system failing to live up to its ideals, or one that has been remarkably successful at managing moral dissonance while remaining fundamentally unchanged?

System is ONLY accountable to its owner. If the owner is happy that the system functions in a way that it addresses all its functional (and other) requirements - the system is working well.

The problem really lies with this specific deception - do systems belong to the people who are supposed to give it legitimacy and validation? If so, are people who are supposedly the owners of the system deceived into believing that the system does something other than what it actually does? Can people (supposed owners of the system) demand that the system is transparent and accountable?

@Naeema

This reframes the “agency dilemma.” The challenge may not simply be to act more ethically within existing systems, but to question whether those systems offer any meaningful path toward ethical coherence in the first place. Not in a nihilistic sense but in the spirit of reimagining what moral engagement looks like outside of the structures that currently define it.

Yes, we must have a way of “invalidating” systems and not just exercising agency (illusion of agency) when the system condones it. We have no say in our government killing people (for example), but we have full agency to shoulder the “healing” of the survivors because it morally redeems the system and socially credits it.

[Naeema]

Really appreciating the direction this conversation is taking @Martin it’s helping me think more clearly about the structural and philosophical distinctions at play here. Your insistence on clarifying the bounded nature of systems, their protective logic, and their non-organic status is important. Framing systems not as evolving organisms but as architected frameworks accountable only to their defined “owners” refocuses the conversation in a necessary way

What you raise about ownership and legitimacy is especially powerful. If systems are indeed accountable only to their owners, the real political and ethical question becomes: who gets to claim ownership, and how is that ownership legitimized or contested? If the people are presumed to be the owners in democratic settings, yet have no say in critical operations (such as decisions of war, surveillance, or structural violence), then perhaps the system is not malfunctioning but misrepresenting its accountability model, a kind of functional legitimacy gap.

Your comment on agency is also striking: that we’re often granted permission to exercise moral repair, but not moral interruption. This conditional agency, where participation is allowed in the healing of what cannot be prevented, deserves further interrogation.

I increasingly feel that these kinds of conversations would benefit from more plural perspectives and the inclusion of diverse stakeholders. Perhaps we need to invite into this space:

• Systems theorists and cyberneticists who can speak to how system boundaries, interfaces, and “correction loops” function or fail.

• Political theorists (particularly from democratic theory or decolonial thought) who explore legitimacy, ownership, and the architecture of institutional accountability.

• Ethicists and critical technologists who are thinking through the moral claims and social implications of automated, procedural, or administrative governance systems.

• And crucially, community organizers, policy designers, and frontline actors those who are positioned not only within systems but often at their margins or pressure points, who experience firsthand both the consequences of systemic decisions and the constraints on agency.

It seems increasingly urgent that we find frameworks that not only critique existing systems but also create space to imagine alternatives; new models of legitimacy, participation, and accountability that aren’t merely patches or overrides, but reconfigurations of what systems could be.

Thank you again for helping stretch the conversation in this direction… I’m gaining a lot from this exchange and would welcome further thoughts on how we might build bridges between theory, governance, and lived experience in this space.

[Martin]

Yep, fully agree - that’s what I called “Spec Drift Dialogues” with one of the stages of the tool - Stakeholder Inquiry Panel - so you have a lawyer, politician, philosopher, economist, lay person etc… explore the scenario through their own lens.

Is teh system enforcealbe? Does it fulfil ethical obligations? Does it address the motivation/frustration behind the design?

Then Execution Tree or Civic Path Map - testing paths:

Expected execution Path
Observed Path
Drift Points

Testability, consequences, feedback loop => Diagnosis

The most important thing is the ownership claim and the need for legitimacy or validation. If you have autocracy - they are the owner and they don’t need any legitimacy.

I’ve taken this entire enquiry out of context - my overarching framing is the type of world we live in - which doesn’t require coherence. The more fluid the structures, the less emphasis on coherence and logic - so what I’m arguing for is that a lot of the trends (both good and bad) arise from opportunities that emerged from the systemic incoherence. That’s for the next presentation though

[Naeema]

This has been one of the most generative exchanges I’ve had in a while thank you @Martin for continuing to push the framing in such a structured and imaginative direction.

The “Spec Drift Dialogues” model you mention with its Stakeholder Inquiry Panel and Execution Tree resonates deeply. It’s precisely the kind of multidisciplinary interrogation that’s needed to expose the assumptions, blindspots, and unintended trajectories within complex systems. I especially appreciate the inclusion of both lay and institutional voices… too often, system design or critique is confined to technocratic or academic circles, when in reality it’s often those at the margins who best perceive the “drift points” in lived terms.

The distinction you draw between expected vs. observed execution paths, and the drift that occurs between them, offers a concrete way to explore not only what systems do, but what they believe about themselves, and whether those beliefs remain testable or defensible over time. That diagnostic model seems especially useful in governance systems where legitimacy is often claimed symbolically, but operationalised through opaque or asymmetrical mechanisms.

Your point about ownership and legitimacy being the crux is well taken especially in the context of autocracies, where the absence of a legitimacy-seeking mechanism is not a flaw, but a defining feature. In democratic or quasi-democratic contexts, however, the illusion of public ownership without actual influence becomes a much more corrosive dynamic, producing civic disillusionment masked as participation.

What I find especially striking, and would love to hear more about in your next presentation, is your framing around systemic incoherence not as breakdown, but as an enabling condition. It flips the script: if the system doesn’t need to be coherent to function, perhaps coherence is not a requirement of power, only of legitimacy. That distinction alone opens up a whole new set of questions about how and why certain trends (policy drift, culture wars, decentralisation, algorithmic governance) are emerging as both threats and opportunities within that incoherent scaffolding.

Very eager to hear more when you’re ready to share the next stage of your work and so looking forward to your next presentation.

P.S. Would be keen to contribute if this opens into a wider forum or collaborative exploration.

[Martin]

@Naeema

What I find especially striking, and would love to hear more about in your next presentation, is your framing around systemic incoherence not as breakdown, but as an enabling condition.

Yes, that’s the main insight - from coherence treated as being essential to coherence optional or not-needed. Coherence is a trade-off for agility and there are various manifestations of the concept - like strategic ambiguity. I’m not saying it’s something I see as positive - but it is the main reason (IMO) behind the emergence of this new counter-movement and associated phenomena - populism, fundamentalism, consumerism…

[Naeema]

That really clarifies the dynamic… especially the point about coherence becoming optional and traded for agility. One case that came to mind as you described this is the emergence of HTS as a de facto government in Syria. It’s a striking example of a counter-reaction to systemic incoherence, not just the collapse of the Syrian state, but the broader fragmentation of international legitimacy and governance frameworks.

What’s interesting is how HTS moved beyond military control to establish a constitutional declaration, brought technocrats into administrative roles, and even attempted sectarian representation within its cabinet. Rather than rejecting governance entirely, it constructed a version of institutional order that provides a kind of hyper-coherence ideological boundaries paired with administrative sophistication.

It speaks to your point that in the absence of coherent systems, actors emerge who offer not just authority but a semblance of clarity and functionality; often more responsive (or performatively so) than the incoherent systems they replace. It’s not a return to order, but a reconstitution of it on very different terms.